The games of Jeremy Keller

Tag Archives: game design

So a lot of people have been talking on twitter, forums, and blogs about writing their own transmissions for Technoir. This is amazing. This is exactly what I was hoping for. I want to help you as much as I can to do this. …and do this well. …so you will do it more. So I decided to write a brief guide explaining my process as I’ve written the Twin Cities and Los Angeles transmissions.

Exposition

Write three paragraphs about your city. One is about its unique take on technology, one is about the environment in the region, and the third is about its society—especially given the influences of technology and environment. Think of what themes you want to address with your transmission and talk about them here. This is the most wordy you get to be in the entire document, so enjoy that freedom while you can.

The Nodes

You’re going to come up with 36 nodes. Six connections, six events, six factions, six locations, six objects, and six threats. Each one is going to have a short, one-line description. Don’t write so much that you explain what the node is—write just enough that the GM reading is inspired to define what the node is herself as she connects it to other nodes on her plot map.Read more »

I just uploaded a new beta document to TechnoirRPG.com. It’s still the same game, mostly, but with a lot of work to clarify it and communicate it better. Thank you to everyone who has been submitting playtest reports. They are helping me tremendously to see what’s working and focus what can be made better.

So here’s one more piece of the puzzle: the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission. It has Connections you will need for making a protagonist and a bunch of other plot nodes and stat blocks to make sure you have some content for the game.Read more »

I wanted to post something about the core mechanic for Technoir. But instead of simply using text, I thought it might make things a bit more fun if I showed you how it works. So here’s a little video demo of the game in action.

Sorry if it’s a bit shaky. Bit difficult to hold an iPhone steady while talking.

There’s a trend in games on the lighter end of the spectrum to ditch currency in leu of a game mechanic that simply tells you whether or not you can afford something. And for the record, this is a trend I agree with. I don’t want to keep track of my dollars and pennies for most games. Especially in ones in which equipment is low on the totem pole of character competency. I used this kind of mechanic in Chronica Feudalis, in fact, with its purse system.

But Technoir is different. I wanted it to have that gear-porn element. The gun with the scope needs to be more expensive than one without. I wanted to make sure that the choice of what you buy, at any level, is meaningful. Technology is cheap in the future, but there’s still a cost when everyone is nearly broke. If you’re criminals and thieves, money matters. There comes a point where abstracting all of that becomes more trouble than it’s worth.Read more »

My first ideas when starting a new game design have the biggest impact on the whole process. It’s something to be careful of and respectful of.

Let’s say I get this cool idea for a dice mechanic. Say, step dice attributes + dice pool skills. There’s a lot of assumptions in that little formula. The first is that there are dice at all. The second is that we’re going to have attributes and skills. That means that, if this is our core mechanic, we’re testing competency more than anything else. That probably means this is an adventure game rather than a story game.[1] So we’re already on the road towards legacy GM/player roles.Read more »

I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett off and on over the last few years. I’m a big fan of Hammett-inspired films like Miller’s Crossing and Brick. This is hardboiled fiction at its best as far as I’m concerned. One of the elements that defines a hardboiled protagonist—besides the cynical attitude—is a willingness to face danger. To get hurt, beat up, or even worse in order to do the job. Generally they get punched in the face a lot.

Hardboiled is an influence on cyberpunk, but it is something I am emphasizing even more so in Technoir. In cyberpunk RPGs there is a tendency to spend a couple hours planning in order to get in and out unseen, unscathed. Hardboiled protagonists walk in the front door. They make their presence known. They make people nervous. They shake the tree and see what falls out. The best way to infiltrate enemy headquarters is to walk up to one of their goons, get tasered unconscious, and taken prisoner.Read more »

One of Chronica Feudalis‘s first ever fans, Nathan Frund, emailed me the other day. He had been following my posts about Technoir and was curious about how easy it was to hack it. Nathan knows his hacking: his blog (Platonic Solid) features the first fantasy hacks for the Chronica system.[1]

I told Nathan about some key areas where Technoir was really easy to hack. In our discussion, Nathan called these “hack points.” So I’m stealing the term from him.

Being hackable has been part of Technoir‘s design from the start. Here are a few examples of easy ways to modify the game:

I notice this tendency while I am designing RPG rules to create shells. That is, game mechanics that have a certain size and shape but require player interaction to fill it up with something. It’s a set of requirements. And when those requirements are met, the player is rewarded.[1]

Consider Wushu‘s core mechanic. For each detail you give in your described action, you add a die to your pool. FATE’s Aspects are shells at the time of character creation. Come up with a phrase about your character then you will have this trait to use in gameplay.

As good as shells are, I’ve been working on a different approach when it comes to game design: seeds. Seeds are low-mass game elements that use player interaction to become something bigger than they started as.Read more »

[1] The terms I use in this post, like shell, probably have a different definition to others in the gaming community. So consider my terms and definitions herein useful only in the scope of this post and any discussion of it. ↩

A few months ago, I posted the first design element of my new game: it’s character sheet. The game didn’t have a title then, but with some help it has since been dubbed Technoir. Much of this game has been designed by the process of creating the character sheet. So, as it has been revised, its evolution is reflected in the changes of the character sheet over the playtesting process.